Dave and Liz - a San Jose 48 Hour Film Project 2009

jamesc

Well-known member
Hey Everyone,

We won the Audience Award for our screening group!!

My friend and I just received our GH-1's last week so we'd thought we go through a trial by fire and shoot our San Jose 48 Film Project with them. We shot a big mix of 1080p/24 and 720p/60 and due to our lack of ND filters, jacked up the shutter for certain scenes instead. We removed pulldown from the 1080 clips, but simply dropped all our 720p/60 into a 24p timeline due to time constraints. Everything was written/shot/edited/composed from 7pm 8/14/09 - 7pm 8/16/09.

Genre: Romance
Character: Zach or Zelda Alexander, an exterminator.
Prop: A piece from a board game
Line: "Tell me again why this matters?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVwc8IXAxrg&fmt=22




I used Canon FD lenses for most of the montage and my friend used the stock lens. I'm not quite sure why, but Canon primes gave us much shallower DOF even at the same focal length and aperture as the stock lens.

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The dinner scene was lit with candles only, Canon FD 50/1.4, ISO 800.

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For the quick chase/feet sequence, I ran with the GH-1 on a merlin. I think it came out pretty smooth.

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For the Hong Kong style fight sequence in the film, we were really pushing the 720/60p with a lot of fast pans. While I was editing, I did notice some mud creep in during some extreme motions, but no one I've shown the film to has noticed.

In the final scene, we shot with the GH-1 to cover the OTS and a Panasonic HMC150 with a Letus/Canon FD 24mm for audio capture. While the DOF and colors were different, I think if I had more time to color correct, it would have come out looking pretty similar.

Some quick lessons learned concerning the GH-1:
- must get nd filters for outdoors shots (looking at the fader nd's). We wanted really shallow DOF on some shots and were forced to crank up the shutter at full tele.
- shooting 1080p/24 handheld then using Motion for image stabilization into a 720p timeline works pretty well
- only had 1 battery per GH-1, and they held up all day
- I've had trouble with batch pulldown removal in JES, so I used Compressor, but a tip that I learned was to run Compressor as a stand alone instance and edit with the non-pull down removal while it's encoding. When encoding is finish, re-connect to the new pulldown removed files and everything should still be perfectly in sync.
- I might not know how to properly set the auto-focus, but it was giving some trouble where it would randomly "breathe" here and there, even when doing a simple over the shoulder static shot. It did make portions of certain takes unusable.
 
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The story really picks up in the dialogue scene before her phone rings. A few misses with focus and such but an enjoyable flick :)

What kind of mics did you use?
 
The story really picks up in the dialogue scene before her phone rings. A few misses with focus and such but an enjoyable flick :) What kind of mics did you use?

I'm glad you enjoyed it! For the dialogue scenes, we used a AT4073a in a Rode Blimp. The audio from the fight sequence was the built-in mic on the GH-1.
 
this was really awesome! one of the best shorts i have seen in a while, and it only makes it even more impressive that it was shot in 48 hrs. great writing, great use of montage (which i usually hate, but in this case set the story up really well), and of course, gotta love the fight scene. also, very creative use of the character(s), line, and prop chosen for you. overall, really a good film. i would like to see some of your other work, if you have any posted.
 
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Good flick. Action/comedy goes together in movies like peanut butter and chocolate. I hope you won.
 
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Really well done! Shows how you can do so much in so little time and not much equipment when you really put your mind into it. Great work!
 
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